Ruins of Modernity: "Ruin in the Turkish Aegean" with Miray Cakiroglu

Join the Ruins of Modernity Focal Group for the first guest lecture of 2022.
 
Ruin in the Turkish Aegean: Futures in the Aftermath of Empire
 
Abstract: Ruin object has proved a productive conceptual anchor of critical theory in its capacity to hold past-present-future and raise questions about historical temporality. Ruin takes two distinct shapes in the Aegean, a regional space that is considered within the scope of the Mediterranean in the history and anthropology literature. On the one hand, the concept captures the prominent ruins of the classical past, and, on the other, it qualifies a form of a historical condition that refers to the aftermath of the violent foundation of the nation-state marked with a forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. In this talk, I will share some preliminary attempts to develop a conceptual framework to read these two genres of ruin against each other. I look at historical projects entailing a future for the Aegean starting from the observation of harabe,the same term that means “ruin” in both senses. I will explore what ruin affords to ultimately think about a regional space that is productive of crises, people who inhabit this regional space, and the conditions of possibility to imagine political futures.
 
Miray Cakiroglu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.
 
Talk and discussion will be in English. Held online. For more information, please contact Prof. Resina or Laura Menéndez at: jrresina [at] stanford.edu (jrresina[at]stanford[dot]edu) or lauramen [at] stanford.edu (lauramen[at]stanford[dot]edu).
 
*Poster image: Miray Cakiroglu, Ephesus Selcuk Collective Memory Center, 2020.